In traditional marketing, PR was a big mountain to climb for new companies. How did you get a majestic publication like the New York Times to cover your little company? And for most tech start-ups, the price of a big PR firm just isn’t in the budget.

Luckily, the age of traditional PR is declining. And this is, in part, due to the way fresh content is organized, spread, and distributed online.

Consider Google Fresh and PubSubHubBub—two new technologies that are making it easier and faster for smaller sites to get their content in front of users—and giving nimble little companies an easy way to get their products in the news without going through the traditional PR route.

Google likes your content fresh

This month, Google announced a new algorithm update designed to push relevant and recent content to the top of the results. This new update impacts a whopping 35% of searches.

“Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.”

Bottom line: Google is looking for fresh, new content. And you don’t need to be a major publisher to get your news to the top results. Focus on delivering quality news types of content–stories that users will share and link to–and you can get inexpensive awareness and exposure for not much effort.

After all, PR is about putting your company in the news. Getting eyeballs and sharing your story. SEO combined with online PR is a perfect way to organically push your content to the top of Google. It might not have the prestige or insane traffic spike of a Wall Street Journal mention–but it also won’t cost you thousands of PR dollars.

Plus, the more forward-thinking media outlets like the Huffington Post look for fresh viral content. If your news story attracts a lot of views then it makes an easier article pitch to the traditional media outlet.

Publish a bunch of new crap?

Nope. Google has made clear that when it says 35% of all content will be fresh that means that in the top ten Google results, there will be a mix between ‘evergreen content’ and new, fresh updates.

In the past, SEO was a huge mountain because the top results were claimed by sites with thousands of backlinks, high PR (PageRank), and ancient, trusted domains.

But now, look what opportunity just opened:

As shown above, Google is blending “classic content” (as in posts that probably have a ton of links pointing to them and a trusted source like Wired.com) and recent posts.

If you are a new company looking for media awareness, then looking for some gaps in recency in the top results might bring some fast, instant, and inexpensive coverage.

Meet PubSubHubBub–the future of ‘push’ content

Google began as a dream: index the millions and millions of pages online. This involved sending out ‘web crawlers’ to find, sort, and classify content for users. But as the internet’s appetite for new content is boundless, the challenge has always been a matter of keeping up with all of the fresh content.

Even back in Google’s early days, the traditional indexing work-flow of crawlers going to servers and scanning them for new content was a laborious process. And the downside of this, for smaller sites, is that the crawlers are often slower to arrive.

But recently PubSubHubBub, a simple protocol extension that currently works with Atom and RSS Url feeds, asked a simple question: what if publishers told servers and search bots when they had new content? That way, indexing technology and servers would have to work less–and users would get their new content faster.

PubSubHubBub is a genius little innovation. And it shows a glimpse of the future of indexing. Images, videos, and all content on the web is going to be real-time.

It’s clear that Google’s current goal is less about building a vast library as it is building a caffeinated cloud of interesting, relevant, things, answers, stories, and bursts of shared attention.

In traditional marketing, PR was a big mountain to climb for new companies. How did you get a majestic publication like the New York Times to cover your little company? And for most tech start-ups, the price of a big PR firm just isn’t in the budget.